Sydney - Investors sold Australian stocks Thursday after a reversal on Wall Street and big falls on Asian markets in the previous session.

Sydney - Construction worker Aaron Neiswander, who lives at his parents' Adelaide home, is out of work and on welfare.

He's been idle since January despite an unemployment rate at a 30-year low and companies so desperate for staff that even some McDonald's restaurants are staffed with guest workers from abroad.

Neiswander, 26, blames picky employers. "I'm just out of the age group," he said. "People are looking for juniors - they want cheap labour."

As Australia moves from boom to doom, Neiswander's chances of leaving the dole queue grow bleaker by the day. Economists say the unemployment rate is already surging and that the run of 
16 straight years of heady growth that made Neiswander so choosey is over.

Sydney - Westfield Group founder Frank Lowy, whose two great loves are making money from building shopping malls and running the game of football in Australia, reckons the global recession will hit professional sport hard.

Attendances will be down, the dollar-value of television broadcast contracts will fall and clubs will struggle to survive as the turnstiles spin more slowly.

"There's only so much money to go around," the country's richest man and the chairman of its Football Federation said. "I think the world will have to contract, so will sport have to contract, it's as simple as that."

But, as other recessions have shown, it's not as simple at that at all.

Sydney - Some are calling sleep the new s

Sydney - Old people with pets live longer and are healthier than those who don't share their home with a dog or a cat.

Sadly, research by the Australian National University's Ruth Paslow has exposed this commonly held view as a myth.

After interviewing 2,551 Australians aged 60-64 she reluctantly concluded that pet owners were more likely to be depressed and to take painkillers than the pet-free.

"I would've been happier finding that pets are good for you," Paslow said, "but I wanted to do research that's reliable and statistically sound."

On the other hand, children who grow up in a home with a dog are less likely to be overweight.

Sydney - Despite inflation rising to its fastest pace since 1995, interest rates are likely to fall again before the end of the year because the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is more worried about slowing growth than rising prices, economists said Wednesday.

The consumer price index (CPI) rose 1.2 per cent in the September quarter, taking the annualized inflation rate to 5 per cent from 4.5 per cent in the year to June.